Vivian Maier

For much of her life, Vivian Maier was something of a mystery. Her photographic talent went largely unrecognized because she kept her work a secret from most of the people who knew her, including the New York and Chicago families she worked for as a live-in nanny and caregiver. Maier only printed a tiny fraction of the hundreds of thousands of images of bustling city life she snapped with her Rolleiflex and Leica cameras over some five decades, and showed them to almost no one, instead amassing boxes and boxes of negatives and unprocessed film. Her fame came about posthumously, and only because the contents of her Chicago storge lockers were sold off at auction in 2007, after she had stopped paying the rent.